In defence of the coffee shop laptopper | Kate Symondson

In defence of the coffee shop laptopper

KATE SYMONDSON

When talking to Iain Sinclair about the state of London today, the author Keggie Carew described the burgeoning population of coffee shop laptoppers as "dystopian". In the wood-panelled Daunt Books in Marylebone, the audience – apart from me – murmured and bobbed heads in accord. People say disapproving things like this over my shoulder all the time, with no attempt made to lower their voice. Online and in-print commentary goes way beyond tutting; it's more a case of shaking fists than shaking heads.

"Freelance freeloaders", "Wi-Fi abusing café squatters", the "laptop brigade", "Wi-Fi rustlers", "laptop loiterers", "colonisers of our cafes" . . . journalists, too, can take this attitude. The "café squatter" is "entitled". They take advantage of free Wi-Fi, leach electricity through their Apple-branded devices and consume little more than tap water for the hours they occupy valuable space. Is this why Carew and crew think me and my laptop emblematic of a world gone wrong?

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The coffee shop is a social space. Screen-fixed eyes and tapping fingers, however, are often deemed anti-social. Coffee shops are reportedly falling silent, bereft of the chatter of human interaction. Jack Hesketh, the owner of three independent coffee shops – Store Street Espresso – told the Guardian that coffee shops are "ultimately . . . social environments. We were finding that you'd go into the café and it would be 15 people at 15 different tables and you could hear a pin drop". He has limited the Wi-Fi in two of his branches, and blocked the sockets in the other. (Curiously, the image on Store Street Espresso's home page is populated with absorbed laptoppers.) The issue, then, is that coffee shops are no longer as they should be – hives of gossip, forums for intellectual debate, dens of revolutionary plotting.

We are living through the third iteration of speciality coffee culture in Britain. The first coffee shop opened next to St Michael's churchyard near Cornhill, London, in 1652. As coffee houses became ever more popular and a welcome alternative to ale houses, so-called "coffee house politicians" likewise proliferated. Early coffee houses were animated with venting, posturing, proselytizing (mostly male) patrons. Matthew Green, a coffee historian, argues that this "was the birth of this idea that people have a right to have an opinion". The shouty world of social media and digital commentary might well be the virtual version of the boisterous seventeenth-century coffee house. The laptopper may have swapped the old salutation "what news have you?" for "what's the Wi-Fi password", but the suggestion that someone plugged into the world wide web is not in some way chattering and exchanging is plainly not true. Is it accurate, then, to call the coffee shop laptopper disconnected? I can't imagine being accused of disconnect by quietly reading in these social spaces, and yet when I read, I am still in some sense shut off from my surroundings. But well-thumbed paper backs are romantic, I suppose; Apple logos and blue-lit screens are not. They are emblematic of capitalist-driven dystopia, the death of imagination. Perhaps. Or, in my case, the means by which I write about the world around me.

In this incarnation, speciality coffee culture is synonymous with gentrification. Data scientists and an entrepreneur-blogger, Sam Floy, created a series of heat maps correlating "on-the-up" neighbourhoods with coffee shop density. This "Coffee and Chicken shop method", as it has come to be known, demonstrates that homebuyers ought to opt for an area where there is a high density of coffee shops, a low density of chicken shops, and low house prices. The opening of an indie coffee shop, for some, heralds artisan coffee and kale-enriched-salads; for others, they are what the urban geographer Tom Slater might call "the spatial expression of economic inequality". When freelance creatives use these spaces to work on their laptops, are they "anti-social" or are they something more sinister, namely "anti-society"?

Attitudes towards the hipster, the millennial, the snowflake all seem to have been seamlessly rolled up into coffee shop concerns. With this in mind, the common use of "entitled" makes a little more sense. But in the aftermath of the recession, crippling cuts to the arts, fewer job positions and the horrible normality of zero-hour contracts, the dawn of the creative freelancer is hardly surprising. With an often unpredictable flow of income, hiring office space or joining the cutting-edge but pricey co-working spaces are, for these displaced workers, not an option. The way many of us work is changing: some, like Darren Elliott, the co-founder of the independent coffee shop Timberyard, are responding to that need.

With careful research of similar spaces in San Francisco, Elliott has created a place where – for the price of regular purchases of food and drink – people can "work, connect, collaborate, and be creative". He says that he has designed the business to have "101 different ways of engaging with our customers", whether that be through supporting resident artists, hosting exhibitions, orchestrating meet ups and entrepreneurial events, even food tasting evenings. Timberyard is a creative hub, and a chatty one at that. In some ways, its model is akin to the bustle and business of a marketplace. Not only do they daily host hundreds of freelance writers, start-ups and designers; they partner with innumerable dynamic young businesses, or, as, Elliott refers to them (tongue-in-cheek) "a network of foodpreneurs". This souk of ideas and commerce may strike some as worryingly modern, but really it's not so far removed from the babble of the seventeenth-century coffee house.

I am writing this in a coffee shop in Angel. I come here or somewhere like it most days. I like to sit at the benches so I can look out of the windows. I buy a steady stream of food and drink and I leave when my battery runs low. I don't leave my house to be seen to work. I go to see. I've met countless people through my solo coffee-shopping. Writing the first couple of hundred words of this article, I met Joshua Coombes, who is both founder of a campaign called "do something for nothing", and a globe-trotting barber who gives free haircuts to the homeless. Meetings like this are not so much chance, they are a regular feature of my untethered working life. They have led to inspiration, collaboration, friends and a sense of community.

We like our writers to write alone, in garden sheds (as Keggie Carew does), or on index cards in cars, à la Nabokov. Writers should be isolated, tortured, preferably tapping away on a typewriter or steeped in ink, not on display, lit up by a lurid screen. For every garden-shedder, history gives us a coffee-shopper. I see your Roald Dahl and I raise you Ernest Hemingway. Martin Amis? Take the Beat poets who spent their days writing in the North Beach cafes in San Francisco. Writing in public is something writers have always done. It's just the tools that have changed.

Kate Symondson is a researcher of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-literature and visual culture, specializing in the art of abstraction.

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